Using Web-Based Instruction,Brief Workshops,and Remote Consultation to Teach Community-Based Providers a Parent-Mediated Intervention

Parent-mediated interventions for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are highly under-utilized in community settings. A challenge to the dissemination of these programs is that provider training protocols must teach both the intervention techniques, and the parent coaching strategies. The current study assesses the feasibility an innovative multimodal training protocol to teach community-based intervention providers Project ImPACT (Improving Parents as Communication Teachers). A total of 30 providers (90% female; 76% Caucasian, 13.3% Multiracial/Other, 3.3% Hispanic/Latino, and 3.3% Asian/Pacific Islander) participated in Phase 1, and 15 of these participants (80% female; 60% Caucasian, 33.3% multiracial, and 6.6% Hispanic/Latino) participated in Phase 2. In Phase 1, providers completed questionnaires and videotaped interactions before and after a web-based tutorial and interactive workshop focused on intervention techniques. In Phase 2, providers completed questionnaires and videotaped interactions before and after a second interactive workshop focused on parent coaching. Results from Phase 1 indicate that the addition of the workshop resulted in higher ratings of training satisfaction (p?<?.01), training adequacy (p?<?.01), and self-efficacy (p?<?.01) of the intervention techniques. Results from Phase 2 indicate the addition of the second workshop resulted in greater training adequacy of the parent coaching strategies, p?<?.01. These results suggest that use of this training protocol is a feasible way to increase access to high quality training in evidence-based intervention for providers working with children with ASD in the community; however, larger scale community-based trials of the training protocol are an important next step.     

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in College Students: A Review of the Literature

The current review presents a theory-guided review of the existing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in college students. Across the eight studies that investigated this topic, moderate reductions were shown in inattentive symptoms but little to no change was reported in hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. Results indicated a moderate treatment effect on self-reported quality of life and school/work functioning, yet less of an impact on GPA, response inhibition, social functioning, and executive functioning. Methodological and statistical problems and inconsistencies were noted. Since college students are emerging adults, it is likely that the optimum CBT intervention for college students with ADHD lies somewhere in between the existing clinic-based adult ADHD CBT interventions as well as the school-based adolescent ADHD psychosocial interventions. Directions for future research and recommendations for clinicians in university settings are provided in an attempt to further develop the existing college students CBT clinical research evidence base.     

Depression and sleep quality in older adults: a meta-analysis

The literature emphasizes depression and poor sleep quality as problems that affect many elderly individuals. However, these problems have been related in few studies and there is no meta-analysis performed so far on this relationship. The present research reviewed the studies performed on the subjective sleep quality in order to understand how it relates to depression in older adults. The review was conducted in January 2016 and comprised publications between 2005 and 2015. Based on the electronic databases Web of Science and EBSCO, we used the keywords ‘sleep quality’, ‘depression’, and ‘older’ to identify the empirical studies performed. After assessing the collected studies, we selected those that presented the elderly as participants, resulting in nine papers (N = 3069). A random-effects method was used to evaluate the relationship between depression and sleep. We found that an older person’s lack of good sleep quality is significantly related with depression. The main limitation of this study was the difficulty in collecting a greater number of studies. Future research should consider the importance of additional variables (e.g. moderators) in order to understand and investigate viable interventions for prevention and health promotion in the elderly.     

Creative ways to well-being: Reappraisal inventiveness in the context of anger-evoking situations

Neuroscientific studies in the field of creativity mainly focused on tasks drawing on basic verbal divergent thinking demands. This study took a step further by investigating brain mechanisms in response to other types of creative behavior, involving more “real-life” creativity demands in the context of emotion regulation and well-being. Specifically, functional patterns of EEG alpha activity were investigated while participants were required to generate as many and as different ways as possible to reappraise presented anger-eliciting situations in a manner that reduces their anger. Cognitive reappraisal involves some of the same cognitive processes as in conventional verbal creativity tasks, inasmuch as it requires an individual to inhibit or disengage from an emotional event, to shift attention between different perspectives, and to flexibly adopt new solutions. To examine whether alpha oscillations during cognitive reappraisal are different from those during conventional creative ideation, the EEG was also assessed during performance of the Alternative Uses task, requiring individuals to generate as many and as original uses of an object as possible. While cognitive reappraisal was associated with a similar pattern of alpha power as observed in conventional verbal creative ideation, the former yielded significantly stronger alpha power increases at prefrontal sites, along with lower alpha increases at more posterior cortical sites, indicating higher cognitive control and less spontaneous imaginative thought processes in the generation of effective strategies to regulate an ongoing negative emotional state.     

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability,concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words—three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. The participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set for each of the three subjective indices, using a Web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.     

Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance

Research shows that contextual diversity (CD; the number of different contexts in which a word appears within a corpus) constitutes a better predictor of reading performance than word frequency (WF), that it mediates the access to lexical representations, and that controlling for contextual CD abolishes the effect of WF in lexical decision tasks. Despite the theoretical relevance of these findings for the study of serial memory, it is not known how CD might affect serial recall performance. We report the first independent manipulation of CD and WF in a serial recall task. Experiment 1 revealed better performance for low CD and for high WF words independently. Both effects affected omissions and item errors, but contrary to past research, word frequency also affected order errors. These results were confirmed in two more experiments comparing pure and alternating lists of low and high CD (Experiment 2) or WF (Experiment 3). The effect of CD was immune to this manipulation, while that of WF was abolished in alternating lists. Altogether the findings suggest a more difficult episodic retrieval of item information for words of high CD, and a role for both item and order information in the WF effect.     

Dissociated control as a signature of typological variability in high hypnotic suggestibility

This study tested the prediction that dissociative tendencies modulate the impact of a hypnotic induction on cognitive control in different subtypes of highly suggestible individuals. Low suggestible (LS), low dissociative highly suggestible (LDHS), and high dissociative highly suggestible (HDHS) participants completed the Stroop color-naming task in control and hypnosis conditions. The magnitude of conflict adaptation (faster response times on incongruent trials preceded by an incongruent trial than those preceded by a congruent trial) was used as a measure of cognitive control. LS and LDHS participants displayed marginally superior up-regulation of cognitive control following a hypnotic induction, whereas HDHS participants’ performance declined. These findings indicate that dissociative tendencies modulate the influence of a hypnotic induction on cognitive control in high hypnotic suggestibility and suggest that HS individuals are comprised of distinct subtypes with dissimilar cognitive profiles.     

More is not always better: paradoxical effects of repetition on semantic accessibility

Repetition normally enhances memory. While in some cases the benefit of added repetition may be incremental, few would expect that massed repetition could actually reverse the benefits of brief repetition. Here we report two experiments that document a clear example of a paradoxical effect of massed repetition. Subjects first repeated words (e.g., "sheep") aloud one at a time for 0, 5, 10, 20, or 40 s. A free association phase followed in which cues could be completed with repeated words (e.g., "herd s___" for "sheep") or with semantically associated words (e.g., "fabric w___" for "wool"). Brief periods of repetition (5-10 s) resulted in priming, as would be expected based on research on repetition priming and spreading activation. Longer periods of repetition (20-40 s), however, abolished priming. Interestingly, this massed-repetition decrement was particularly robust for semantic associates of repeated words, and was evident after a 15-min delay. These findings document a paradoxical feature of the effects of rehearsal on memory: When ideas are repeated often enough, the benefits of rehearsal can actually be reversed.     

Contribution of the parafascicular nucleus in the spontaneous object recognition task

The parafascicular (PF) nucleus, a posterior component of the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, is considered to be an essential structure in the feedback systems of basal ganglia–thalamo-cortical circuits critically involved in cognitive processes. The specific role played by multimodal information encoded in PF neurons in learning and memory processes is still unclear. We conducted two experiments to investigate the role of the PF in the spontaneous object recognition (SOR) task. The behavioral effects of pretraining rats with bilateral lesions of PF with N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) were compared to vehicle controls. In the first experiment, rats were tested on their ability to remember the association immediately after training trials and in the second experiment after a 24 h delay. Our findings provide evidence that PF lesions critically affect both SOR tests and support its role in that non-spatial form of relational memory.